A couple nights ago I made the best meal I've ever prepared for myself. I don't feel too arrogant saying this because my standards for home cooking are not terribly high; I generally don't like to put too much effort into making food for one, and I'm more concerned about consuming nutritious meals than gourmet ones. That said, if I can achieve low maintenance, healthy, and delicious, I'm pretty wowed. This particular meal was inspired by a black-eyed pea dip I had at Fodder & Shine  recently. I wanted to make my my own, which really is just hummus with black-eyed peas instead of garbanzo beans, but I also wanted use it in a way that felt more like a meal than a snack. I also remembered some vegan tacos I'd recently had at Bartaco , which included cauliflower and almonds in the filling. The carrots and onions just seemed like a nice complement to the roasted cauliflower. Then I needed something green, and the collards helped bring everything together (lite...

I've been wanting to make almond milk from scratch for some time, but it always seemed like too much work. But when I came across this recipe on Oh She Glows , I thought, this is doable. As always, I made a couple of exceptions: I didn't have a nut-milk bag, and I didn't use vanilla, because buying dried vanilla beans is expensive! I thought the flavors from the dates and cinnamon would be plenty. I soaked my raw almonds--and dates, which is suggested if they are not very soft to start with--for about five hours. The recipe doesn't say how much water to soak them in, but I just made sure they were well covered with water. (You can also soak them over night.) Then I drained and rinsed the soaked almonds and dates. I then blended the almonds and dates with 3.5 cups of water on high for about a minute.  Next, I thought I would use my fine-mesh strainer plus a cheesecloth to strain the liquid from the pulp, but the cheesecloth turned out to be more troub...